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Yesterday (as I write in early June of 1996), I was playing with a little girl who loves to talk. Her name is Clara, and if I am to trust her, she has just turned five years old. She insisted that I ask her selected jokes from one of her favorite books. This was not the first time I found myself reading jokes to her from this book. I would turn the pages, and she would tell me which jokes to ask, based on the pictures. She claimed she could not read, and I wondered whether this was due to some strange experiences in the past that made her think she was somehow bad when she had tried. She certainly could have been able to read if she'd tried - she was bright enough - but she was not in the least interested in trying. She was interested in hearing her oft-repeated jokes one more time and having the pleasure of knowing all the right answers one more time. At first, I felt a little frustrated as I discovered my role. For Clara, the value of this activity, like most activities, came from the power she felt by being knowledgeable. At first, I wanted to teach her something, to make me feel powerful. Luckily, I caught myself. I allowed her to be who she needed to be, and I was able to be who she needed me to be.
This experience demonstrates one of the most important things I have ever learned about life. The learner is always right about her needs, and although we might not always be able to play the role other people need us to play, the more we do it the more we help them. (I've so often found, in retrospect, that when I thought someone should have been ready to learn something and they didn't want to or couldn't, that there was a perfect explanation)
My Mom was with me visiting Clara. ``Chris, you used to be just like that'' she said. ``Well, very active, that is. But for her it's always her mouth that's going, and with you it was always your legs.'' That comment reminded me of another thing my Mom had said about me: ``I really had to work hard to be there to help create an interesting and novel environment for you. You could do one thing intensely for a little while, but then you'd grow tired of it, and you'd need something new. Some kids can be satisfied being quiet and doing very little. Not you. You always had to have something to do.'' There is no way I could appreciate my Mom and Dad enough for the enormous amount of energy they put out to let me do just what I needed to do. That support helped me to feel confident about myself growing up and provided the environment in which I developed so many essential skills. Development of skills (like using language or doing math) occurs best not with practice for its own sake, but where practice is the means to an emotionally-worthwhile goal.
For instance, even before elementary school, I was an avid fisherman. One day in the early years of elementary school, I was driving with my Mom to the dentist. We drove by a large pond that was completely empty and stopped to investigate. In one spot on the shore, there were thousands of dead fish - catfish, I thought. I suggested that we could take these home and use them in the garden to fertilize corn, as Indians had done. But Mom suggested that if any of these half-rotten fish got into her car that it would stink for weeks, so I gave up that idea. Still, I wondered why the lake had been drained. In situations like that, I always assumed that Mom or Dad would know the answers, but in this case neither of them knew. They suggested that I write a letter to ``the state'', asking ``them'' why it was so. This immediately became very important to me, and I soon got some help writing the letter. It was the first official letter I'd ever written, and I was very excited. I received a reply from a ``fisheries biologist'' in the State Capital. He explained that Baker Pond had been drained to change the balance of fish and algae, but that it would be filled again before long. He also enclosed some charts and graphs, which I had fun trying to understand. (Now, of course, there were three options for what to be when I grew up: Mom, Dad, or ``fisheries biologist!'')
The point I want to make is to illustrate the value of viewing education within the context of meaning. If I had been taught how to write a letter in a class, I would certainly have gotten practice. But when I was excited to find out about Baker Pond, I was excited about learning how to write a letter. Practicing something is useful when it has meaning for the person practicing it. If for some reason I hadn't wanted to write the letter, it would have been futile for Mom or Dad to try and get me to learn by doing it. In that case, even if I acceded to their suggestions and wrote the letter, I would not have understood why one writes letters. I might have falsely thought that one writes letters to do what Mom or Dad says, and missed the point about communication. I think this is actually a large part of why so many people have such strange aversions to so many wonderful parts of life. That's what happened to me with penmanship.
For many years, I did not make the connection between neat writing and communication. I thought neat writing was made to please powerful old people. At some point, someone must have insisted I write neatly when it did not make sense to me (no matter how wise it might have seemed to them.) They might have even explained that they were having trouble reading my writing. But I still did not understand. No one can know why there are times when people do not understand when we speak to them so clearly. But there is always a good reason. If you do not respect that reason - even if it is not clear what that historical (or other) reason is - then you destroy a part of the person you are supposedly helping. In a specific sense, the connection between penmanship and communication that I might have made some other time was instead filled by a connection between penmanship and powerlessness, penmanship and stupidity, or penmanship and authority. In a general sense, the student's ability and tendency to think for himself is damaged because the authority figure denies the validity of the reasoned suggestions of the student. The student's perception of the world is the only one they know and to invalidate his logic is to invalidate logic itself. I lost some of my ability to reason because of that penmanship experience.
I have a name for the principle of not trying to teach something that is inappropriate for a learner at a particular time: meeting a learner ``where he is at.''
``But,'' you might ask, ``What about calculus? If I am `at' (or my reasoning ability is `at') only the level of understanding algebra, how could an expert teach me calculus - clearly, I am not `at' it, by your definition! With this idea of meeting people `where they are at', no one could really learn anything at all.'' This illustrates an important misunderstanding. Where someone is ``at'' is not the level of skill they have, but what they believe is meaningful to do or learn.
You might counter again. ``But some people do not know what is objectively meaningful, and they will never develop that ability. We must therefore force or con them into doing things that they do not think are meaningful, in the interest of long-term learning.'' The assumption is that some people will never know what is objectively meaningful. In my experience, this may be slightly true, but I tend to find that people are unable to properly apply any skills they learned which they did not choose to learn. Conversely, every person I have ever known who has been encouraged to do what they want has grown tremendously in their abilities during that period - and have been able to apply their skills. Will every student develop this ability? The documented success of schools like Summerhill and Sudbury Valley prove my point (if you are not familiar with the studies that have shown this, I strongly encourage you to research them). Despite the leniency of these schools, the graduates are consistently very skilled and able to decide what to do for themselves.
I want to propose another idea. Why do millions of students graduate from American high schools not knowing how to read? Certainly this is not because they have not been ``taught.'' They have been taught incessantly - but only things which weren't meaningful to them at the time. The insistence on teaching destroys many students' future desire to learn. In first grade, the teacher's insistence on the lessons destroys the desire to learn in second and third grade; in second and third grade, the teacher's insistence destroys the desire to learn for the rest of elementary school.
Returning to my narrative - I have to be careful of using myself as a good example or a bad example or anything; I am embarrassed at the childish simplicity and overpolarization with which I think of my own life. But I am also not going to solve all my problems in the process of writing this paper, and they are going to have to get in the way of my presentation whether I like it or not. Let me give an example of some of my history which I am unable to make enough sense of, especially of course when I keep trying to ask ``why.''
When I was in Junior High, it was my practice to wear whatever I darn well pleased to school. For quite a while, I was not really aware of the seriousness that my classmates attributed to clothing. I knew they talked about it sometimes, but the idea that clothing could really be important to them was absolutely foreign to me. I thought it was kind of a joke. Little did I know that it really was what they were thinking about. I remember that by the time I went to high-school I was conscious (at least for the first day) of the clothes I was wearing. I remember the shirt I wore - which is the kind of thing I would not have noticed several years before. I was even proud of it. I thought I looked good. Aside from a few other amusing, failed attempts to wear the right clothes (like cocking my hat up into the sky as was the habit of the hockey players my freshman year of high school) I did not engage extensively in conscious dressing. My roommate and friend from sophomore and Junior years of high school, Martin Timothy, later described my process of dressing: ``You put on a shirt, put on socks, put on pants, and go.'' Of course, I thought - what could he possibly be talking about? Then he explained that he had tried this once, but it just hadn't worked for him. Apparently ``dressing'' had a different meaning for him. It was more about ``selecting'' than ``grabbing.''
That period of my life - and in particular the lack of social interaction I had - had a real effect on me. I had only sparse contact with girls, though my fantasies were quite extensive. I felt different and unattractive. I have come to believe that attraction is often the desire to be acknowledged by (and then wanted by) those who have power over us. Those girls in the middle school years definitely had power over me. And to this day my interactions with women to a certain extent always include meeting my need to be validated then.
Later, Mom and Dad later said to me that they had ruled out alternatives like homeschooling or private school during this time because they thought there was social value in being in public school. I think this was a poor choice. The ``value'' of the ``social'' experience ended up making me feel socially worthless and different, on top of the ``lack of social skills'' I was supposedly fixing. The lack of acceptance from my peers turned out to make me more insistent on being who I was, rather than learning any new social skills. This lasted until meeting Martin in high school, who was able to appreciate me for who I was rather than dismissing me because I didn't know how to act convivially.
Like my Mom noted, I was an active kid. I was often competitive, and won ribbons in running, triathlons, skiing. Swimming turned out to be my nemesis, and though I was on the swim team for many years, they should have renamed it the thrash and sink league in my honor. Soccer was one of my team sports. I was better than average, but in my imaginary world always just about to finally dominate. It was probably the first sport at which I thought I would be one of the best in the world. It was almost as if I would make up for not being the best under current conditions by ``showing them'' and becoming the best in the world ``someday'' - whether it was in math, cycling, or ski racing. This trend of thinking that I would eventually be the best at the things has played an interesting role in my development. Probably like most kids, mine was always a private fantasy. Only in the past few years have I become aware of how dependent I am on external validation, and begun to explore other ways to be.
My childhood had many valuable ingredients: caring parents who talked to me a lot, who bent over backwards to help me participate in the outside world in ways I wanted to, who had had the opportunity to take jobs that gave them more free time than money, and had taken these opportunities; better-than-average teachers - especially in elementary school - who were open to working with me at my level; a safe environment in the hills of Vermont where I had ample opportunity for exploration. The elementary school program I was in had been set up by my mother just in time for me to join it. It was a first to third grade multi-age class with several teachers. I went through a similar class from fourth to sixth grade. I don't remember these classes particularly well, though I know they were structured more flexibly than the classes most kids in America were in. At the time, I actually assumed all education was structured this way. I think they were still too structured for me though. Spelling sentences, reading and writing times, activity times, physical education class, music class. I asked Mom what she thought the main effects of me having been in a setting that was more structured than was right for me. ``Probably a lot of your intolerance of institutions today comes from having done stuff then that you knew wasn't right for you.'' God, she is smart sometimes.
Many tragedies that take less than a minute to manufacture take years to overcome. Others take a generation, or more. I think the remnants of these power-struggles stay with us and our progeny forever, contributions to eternal Karma. However, their negativity can be greatly reduced by individuals who are devoted to understanding themselves. Generally, this work means loosening habits, and discovering that they are not part of us. Sometimes that means just observing oneself; sometimes it means repeatedly crying out the pain that we have repressed for so many years.
I've already mentioned how my junior high was a social disaster. Academically, it was not too much better, and certainly several steps down from elementary school. Knowing that ``the curriculum'' would provide me with very little to challenge me in math and science (which I was most interested in), my mom had arranged for me to take Algebra I in seventh grade. This was certainly not common in Randolph. She had convinced the math teachers that if I (or any of several other ``talented'' math students who had been in her elementary school classes) could do well on the Pre-Algebra final exam, we could skip the course. We did do well, and found ourselves in a mishmash of eight-graders and high-school students in Algebra I. We all passed easily. I suspect I was often bored - though not nearly as bored as I was in geometry class the following year. I took the usual array of courses both years: English (disliked it), social studies (though I was sometimes bored, I also often enjoyed the class, because the teachers were excited about what they were teaching), math (too slow), science (too slow and repetitious), band, art, industrial arts, home economics (made a pillow that said ``I LOVE POLOCS''), and physical education.
In eighth grade, my Mom arranged for a meeting with my teachers, because she did not feel that I was being challenged enough. ``I think Chris is lazy. I've got a computer with all kinds of extra programs that he can come and learn from if he's not learning enough science from class,'' said the science teacher. Mom told me later that this had been a little too much for her: ``I don't know why you didn't like his computer programs in his `back room', but I do know one thing: that you weren't lazy. You were constantly working on exciting things out of school, whether that be designing a tennis-ball cannon with your father, or writing that newspaper, or being a page in the legislature, or whatever. Seems like they ought to be able to give you at least some chances like that in school!'' Needless to say, the results of the meeting were not wonderful. A partial respite was in store when I was accepted for a position shuttling notes back and forth for the Vermont state legislature four days a week in January and February. But then in March, the legislature was through, and it was back to the boring books!
My parents helped me look at private schools, and I eventually applied to five, of which I attended the only one that admitted me, Northfield Mount Hermon. Interestingly, I had a notion that NMH was the school of the five that I would least like to attend, based on it having a ``humanities'' program. ``Humanities,'' I assumed, would be more of the same English that I so detested. The way it turned out, this ``humanities'' program (as my parents at the time hoped and suspected, despite my arguments to the contrary) turned out to be one of the best parts of the school, more than anything else thanks to the teacher I mentioned in Chapter I, Bill Batty. It was a clean break and a new chance.